How Jews could use nature to point God’s attribute because God is the Creator this might separate Israel from Pagan nations. Chapter eight, “Nature,” pointed to the fact that the early Jews in the Psalms were largely peasants and very familiar with the land in which they lived.
Lewis greater look on evil is being silent concerning surrounding evil is indirect approval, which is a greater point to discuss and think if not Christians might become second Pharisee group. Following chapter six talks about “Sweeter than Honey,” Lewis described how sweet God’s law as “delicious.” Lewis says that Psalmist expressed his love towards God’s laws through his poetry, and Lewis explains the basic point of ‘Law,’ God’s Law is righteous not because He decided it is but God Himself is righteous.Ĭhapter seven, What Lewis calls “Connivance,” he argued here that God’s word not just condemns those who do evil, but also those who do nothing about evil as well.
Here gentile worshippers are not familiar with this expression but still Christians can still learn from the Psalms about God-centered emphasis and its point of the highest degree of joy found in God and in Him alone. Lewis argues that when the Jews discuss that they are seeing the Lord or wanting to be with Him as Psalmist expressed, they might be describing being in the Temple. According to Psalmist, the glory of Lord dwelt in the Temple and Psalmist spoke of his desire to dwell in the Temple forever with the presence of the Almighty. The author expounds on the idea of the Jews, and their desire to see the Lord in the Holy Temple. The chapter “The Fair beauty of the Lord,” took a different notion and mood than above chapters. Here Lewis took a view of earthly or worldly peace and prosperity instead of what God wanted them to focus on spiritual areas. Lewis speaks of forgiveness and compares with teachings of Jesus, here he warns his reader to not to fall in ‘self-righteousness.’ The following chapter is “Death in the Psalms,” Lewis gave a surprising portion what Jewish believed in death and resurrection from that view of after-life. Moving to the next chapter, ‘Cursings,’ this chapter could be the most applied chapters in this book. This book has a total of 12 chapters with 2 Appendix in 2 nd and 3 rd chapters Lewis dealt with “Judgement in Psalms” and “The Cursing.” In chapter he starts with a confession of a common believer, ‘Christian trembles it is the thought of God’s judgement,’ It is true that Christians look at judgement as ‘the day of wrath, that dreadful day,’ but in Jewish perspective it is ‘in terms of an earthly court of justice.’ Lewis stretches to the point that Christians look at the judgement as criminal but Jew as a civil case (137). He called that it is not an ‘apologetic work,’ and defended his work on Psalms is not to convince unbelievers but to encourage those who already believed it “a man can’t be always defending the truth there must be a time to feed on it” (136). Since Lewis wants to ‘suspect more’ (135) he worked through specific topics throughout Psalms without any order. Example for his claim of literature reading is ‘parallelism’ which means that the ‘practice of saying the same thing twice in different words,’ as it is in Psalm 2 and 6. Psalms are not intended for theological or as ‘doctrinal treatises’ but they are ‘poems,’ and he suggests that one ‘cannot properly be read except as literature’ (134).
Lewis claimed this book as an amateur attempt to understand Psalms and in the first sentence, he mentioned, “this is not a work of scholarship” (133).
Lewis followed a most practical thing, he did not follow to explain entire Psalms, and he did not divide into chapters or sections. His basics of sticking to the simple language with profound can be found in this book too. Lewis’s book Reflections on the Psalms is an excellent book to understand Psalms as a common reader.
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